new museum

It’s August and I’m already looking at the end of my time at NEW INC. I’ll move out of 231 Bowery by the end of this month. It’s been an intense year, a very good one, for lots of reasons. This studio space here and the incredible community in the New Museum’s incubator helped me focus on writing, teaching and special publishing projects — as Counterpractice. It’s the first time that I’ve opened up my studio to a wider range of non-client work, in a more formalized way (please, no more “side-projects”). The balance was never perfect but I’ve learned to stay alert for unexpected alignments and frictions. I’m learning from all of it. In May I was asked to be a contributing editor at Rhizome, so I now have another outlet for writing and developing special projects and extending my experimental publishing research.

The students were excellent and we presented a mini collection of zines, postcards and printed matter to Olia for the school’s library.

This was my first LotPW workshop and creating a site-specific collection of materials in real-time is a beautiful format. I’ll use it again.

While I was there I gave my “Performing Publishing” talk at Stadtsbibliothek Stuttgart (the city’s new public library that feels like a set from the Matrix). This library knows how to make speakers feel welcome. No, this is not a rendering.

And then I was Paris-bound, where I had been invited by Fondation Galeries Lafayette to deliver a talk (“Making Public”) and conduct a two-day workshop for an awesome mix of artists, media critics, designers and curators (including Alessandro Ludovico, Raphael Bastide, Oliver Laric, Neil Cummings from Wolff Olins, Joachim Hamou and Nicolas Delaforge, a semantic web engineer). The scenario was to imagine how the new OMA-designed art institution opening in 2018 would treat the artifacts of artistic production, from archiving to publishing.

Making public became a kind of mantra for me while I spent the week in the Marais writing the talk and posing questions around posting, multiple publics, memory, temporality, poor media and physical space. I’d love to develop this talk into a broader text about the role of publishing for artists and art institutions.

In September I’m back at RISD. I’ll be full-time on a year-long term appointment, teaching the core design studio for graphic design juniors as well as Experimental Publishing Studio (this time as an undergrad elective). I’ll try to spend more time in Providence, which might be easier now without the need to rush back to my studio on the Bowery. I’ll be writing and designing and putting my fall projects together from Rhode Island, as much as I can.

In September I’ll participate in Yami-Ichi Internet Black Market at the Knockdown Center in Queens, and then you’ll find me in the zine tent at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (Sept 18–20).

All issues of Printed Web (1–3) will be available at both of these events (except the Chinatown Edition, which is sold out), as well as the first of my new Printed Web Editions — one-off artist project zines.

Meanwhile, Library of the Printed Web continues to grow. Please direct all web-to-print projects my way for consideration! Someday, I’ll properly conserve these artifacts and develop a proper home for this collection. The works deserve to be treated better than my sorry bookcases at home.

When I launched Counterpractice in September, before I knew what it really was, I heard from people who said they were looking forward to seeing what would come out of it. I wondered, too. Even though I didn’t have any kind of plan, I knew that it was the right time to reboot and redefine my practice, after a few years of drifting from client work to residencies to teaching.

However vague, I had a few ideas. Counterpractice would need to embody a spirit of resistance, research and radical curiosity that I’d been building during the last few years. It would be home-grown, small and DIY. Less a service, client-based business and more “ideas laboratory.”

Tomorrow, the New Museum is hosting “demo day,” where 20 select members of NEW INC will present what they’ve been working on here. From what I can see, it’s a chance for the museum to showcase the program and the products that members are developing here.

I’m not presenting, and I have mixed feelings about this.

I’m focused on building my practice right now. Not by growing my client list or launching a product but by synthesizing what I do — what I previously thought of as side-projects or interests — into a single, articulated studio practice.

Much of this is “invisible” work. Defining how I work, balancing what I do and deciding which risks to take. This is a difficult agenda to quantify.

I don’t even see Printed Web as “product” but as an ongoing idea, with the magazine being just one way to articulate my thoughts around independent publishing, artistic practice and network culture. Teaching at RISD and events like Theorizing the Web and Interrupt (at Brown) are good venues for me to expose these ideas (I’m presenting at both)…but packaging them into a five-minute slide show to New Museum media and trustees feels “off.”

So I’m trying to shape (and sharpen) my overall practice and be selective about how and where to expose myself.

All of this has happened since I arrived at NEW INC just a few months ago, where the conditions have been ideal. A super-stimulating community and ample institutional support are excellent motivators; I had lacked both of these for a long while. Plus, a studio space like ours — open, shared and collaborative — means we’re constantly “working in public,” which can create a heightened sense of productivity.

Maybe these ingredients — community, institution and exposure — have given me a kind of permission, too. Sometime between September and now, it occurred to me that my studio is four connected parts. And for the first time, I’m giving equal weight to each:

1 Research/writing
2 Teaching
3 Publishing
4 Client work

Even though this looks like an obvious list, the first three components are totally new for me. They weren’t part of Soulellis Studio from 2001–10, or my career before. For twenty years, I had been solely focused on client work. So I look at this list and I see a new way of working.

What’s critical for me right now is being fully devoted to each of the four. And working hard to integrate them. My syllabus for Experimental Publishing Studio (a new graduate studies course I’m about to start teaching at RISD) contains readings and ideas that come straight out of my own research, which come out of (and fuel) my Printed Web projects. And I’m constantly looking for ways to bring this openness and these kinds of connections into the work I’m hired to do for clients.

I’ve moved into my new studio at NEW INC and Counterpractice is real. And it feels different. Overnight, how I work has changed. I’m in a huge studio space filled with creative people and we’re all stretching into new territory. Working here is public and social. The stimulation is infectious. I haven’t felt this motivated in a long while.

And just off of the quiet of Portlander, I’ve landed in a September frenzy. A good frenzy though. Printed Web No. 2 is about to launch and a nice series of talks and exhibitions is coming up. Here’s what’s happening:

I’m launching Printed Web No. 2 at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. There’s an artists’ talk on Sunday, September 28 at 1pm, part of “The Classroom” (organized by David Senior, MoMA Library). More about that soon.

After I gave the Resistance talk at Build I struggled with next steps. I kept making and teaching but none of it was sustainable and I didn’t know what to do. It took a good six months to understand that I should use that talk as the basis for a new kind of studio—one that’s wide enough to include projects like Printed Web and Portland Bill but selective enough to take on meaningful client work at the same time. So, Counterpractice was born. And it needs to live in a collaborative place.

I didn’t mention stretching, but opening up to uncertainty is a big part of this (or rather, allowed this to happen). So, I built Counterpractice.com by hand. For anyone familiar with front-end web development, this is almost laughable—it’s a dumb one-pager of minimal text and images. For me, it was a big deal. During the last couple of weeks I used Codecademy to teach myself HTML and CSS and I made it work (Krate stepped in to clean up the code, thankfully). It was the first time that I didn’t hire someone else to build a site for me, and it’s my first Counterpractice project (similarly, an early version of Soulellis.com was the first project I did as Soulellis Studio, back in 2001—using Dreamweaver! it was also the last site that I ever built myself). Counterpractice.com is pretty bare bones: images are hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket and the site sits within my Dropbox account. Still, it’s a start.

Aaron Straup Cope
Motive
The luxury of association
Selfawareroomba
Elevator songs / whale songs / we assign value without meaning
The objects are recording stories
People are building stories around the things we collect
How we’re teaching things to see in the world and what’s bouncing back — patterns, bursting through
Crazy-talk narratives that can be shaped from those patterns
Drones
Automating the pattern matching
The inevitability of self self driving cars
Algorithms are emerging that people don’t know what to do with
Worrying that we’re building a future without narrative
Filters are the difference between flickr and Instagram / the past is just a medium, a screen to help make sense of the present
Massive feedback loop of the mirrored schroedinger’s box

Joanne McNeil
The Internet isn’t a mirror it’s full of lies and stories and fictions
The map weirdness / not errors but what you see through the looking glass
How machines tell stories to us
rhizome
The act of reflection / people not recognizing themselves in daguerreotypesDora Moutot / webcam tears
Tears are the new pornography
Google street view going inside franks LATrap streets / streets that don’t exist

James Bridle
Demarerializarion of the book / we had no way to express our fear, so we obsessively focused on the physicality
The real worries are around the ownership and understanding
Amazon warehouse — a space that is augmented by algorithm / co-space / humans & software processing, architecture a function of the software
Code/space
Nostalgia / a deliberate act of committing the image to memory / engraining photographs with grain, giving them weight, then sharing, sharing is a form of memory, giving if weight, like putting them in a boxThe city & the city / unseeing, moments of breach, and yet we choose to layer images all the time
Intense cognitive dissonance apple maps
Trying to find ourselves in the satellite imageClement VallaMishka Henner / Dutch landscapes
Data centers are the new civic architecture (post, admin)
Stuartgeiger.com bots on wiki / automated agents
Co-creating the system with us: our machines
Drone project / shadows of real technology that acts from a distance
The velocity of the material / jenniferbrook / book vs app
Opinions are noncontemporary
Tarot cards / incredible machine and storage device for storytelling
The network is like that
William Gibson / notional space, cyberspace
Living inside the machine, inside the network